Brightness Falls: Letter From New York

The towers of the World Trade Center were always too obvious an exclamation of New York’s famous attitude, its confidence in Gotham’s unrivaled greatness; they shouted out too loudly its pride in power, in excess (two of them!), in ambition. They made an easy target; now they’re out of reach. So too, for a while, is the town’s chutzpah; this is not the moment for satire. But it won’t be long before Manhattan bounces back and, with it, the New York novel, its feelings about its hometown, always ambivalent, now bruised by tragedy.

Writers have been using New York as a backdrop since Washington Irving published “The Salmagundi Papers,” a lighthearted satirical miscellany, in 1807. At the next turn of the century, Henry James, William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton were writing novels set in a proud and bustling American metropolis. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in “The Great Gatsby” (1925), paid lyrical tribute (“I began to like New York, the racy adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye”). After World War II, there was a sudden abundance of fresh fiction set in New York and written by a roll call of America’s great: Bernard Malamud, Dawn Powell, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth. The Broadway Saul Bellow described in “Seize the Day” (1956) is imperishable, with its “great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions”; but theirs was just a big, populous city. New York was vast and vibrant: unique, but not yet dominant.

After the malaise of the Carter years, when Ronald Reagan began sounding a triumphalist note, novelists took to writing about a town that conceived of itself as the capital of the world, brassy and omnipotent, the most important city in the richest, most powerful nation. Hubris had stretched to 110 floors and cloned itself--and the New York novel was ready to be born. It’s a novel that puts the city center stage and turns it into a multifaceted symbol for wealth and power and sex--and the punishing absence, or loss, of all three.

The most famous example of this raucous, overstated genre, and in many ways its locus classicus, is Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987). Jay McInerney wrote an early, lightweight version, “Bright Lights, Big City” (1982) and a decade later tried hard for something heftier with “Brightness Falls.” Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho” (1991), notorious for its splatter porn, is the black sheep of the genre. Kurt Anderson’s contribution, “Turn of the Century” (1999), is tailor-made for media junkies. Easily the best British version is Martin Amis’ “Money” (1984). There are many more. But the best of them all, the most complex, the most gorgeous is Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” (1997); to borrow a phrase from the book, DeLillo is wired to all the “consciousness powering down the flumes of Manhattan.” The latest addition to the genre--you might almost call it posthumous--is Salman Rushdie’s “Fury,” which, though excoriated in the American press (James Wood dubbed it “a novel that exhausts negative superlatives”), has popped up, inexplicably, on some bestseller lists.

Each New York novel is stuffed with the exuberance and teeming variety of an island that caters to everyone’s dreams--and nightmares. Flip the pages and you see vanity leading a parade of sins on a climb to dizzying worldly success: greed, envy and lust closing in on fame and fabulous luxury. There’s defeat, too, bleak poverty and hopeless anonymity. In between: a ceaseless striving.

These books rush from boom to bust; it’s inevitable: The city is the repository of the world’s ambition, and ambition, in novels, crashes. But not until there’s been a having-it-all moment, an eyeful of surface dazzle. Think of Sherman McCoy in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” congratulating himself on being one of the “Masters of the Universe.” DeLillo escorts us to the Black & White Ball that Truman Capote threw for Katharine Graham at the Plaza in 1966, a harbinger of things to come: “The ballroom seemed to throb with crosscurrent interests and appetites. Political power mingling lubriciously with art and literature. Domed historians clubbing with the beautiful people of society and fashion.” It’s the germ of the ‘80s planted in the ‘60s. To give us the flavor of the ‘70s, DeLillo invites us for cocktails on a terrace at the top of the world, shows us Manhattan from the roofline, “a hidden city above the grid of fever streets.” The World Trade Center is under construction, “already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks”; you can see it from almost everywhere, “bulked up at the funnel end of the island.” The skyline spells privilege.

Rushdie’s New York is now, right-this-moment (except that the moment was obliterated last month); in “Fury,” he rhymes, “America, in the highest hour of its hybrid, omnivorous power.” At this pinnacle, in all New York novels, urgent consumption rules: Expect a barrage of brand names, lists of hot new restaurants and many mentions, often lifted from gossip columns, of those lucky bold-faced folk who are “in.” Rushdie again: “Everybody, as well as everything, was for sale.”

The mood, at a certain moment in every New York novel, swings from surfeit to menace, and DeLillo does it better than anyone. In “Underworld,” he refers to “the endless inspired catastrophe of New York”; someone remarks, “This city is the ticking clock.” In “Mao II” (1991), seen from a loft in TriBeCa, the World Trade Center towers “stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word ‘loomed’ in all its prolonged and impending force.”

On the cover of “Underworld” is a gloomy photo of the towers, definitely looming, and in the pages of the novel he shows us the view from across New York Harbor: the twin towers in the distance behind a mountain of garbage, the vast Fresh Kills landfill, built to accommodate 50 million tons of trash (“The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not”). Between the towers and the landfill, two monuments to human ingenuity, both essential to New York, DeLillo locates a “poetic balance.” Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher.

Every author who sits down to write a New York novel has a touch of the Old Testament prophet; none can resist the urge to flirt with apocalypse, to shout, “The end is near!” and spook us with threats of destruction or civic chaos. Personal disaster, the crash of urban ambition, needs a collective or, anyway, generalized correlative. Look for riots, bombs, serial killers, enraged hackers, the virus, dangerous lunatics, terrorists. (This is a bicoastal phenomenon: Three years ago, in “Ecology of Fear,” Mike Davis traced a lengthy “genealogy” of Los Angeles disaster fiction, a lurid B-movie cousin to the New York novel.)

In a freak coincidence that reminds us of the imagination’s uncanny ways, Rushdie, in “Fury,” introduces a taxi driver, Ali Majnu, who, “out of some misguided collectivist spirit of paranoiac pan-Islamic solidarity

What next? When I asked DeLillo about the fate of the New York novel, he warned, “Anything we say right now is pure speculation, but we can assume that the attack will cast some kind of shadow on future work--but that could be short-lived. The good work will be driven by a writer’s inner impulse more than anything else.” He paused and then added, “Ask a younger writer. Ask Bret Easton Ellis.”

Caution will surely be exercised: Even after New York’s cycle of boom and bust cranks up again, even after the cutthroat climb to the top is reinstated as the city’s preferred modus operandi, who will want to plot scenes of apocalyptic failure? The best New York novels of the coming years will defy expectations. But that shadow DeLillo spoke of will still be there, cast by the reader’s burdened memory. This we can say for sure: From now on, when a writer conjures up New York, ghostly images of Sept. 11, 2001, will flicker in the margin.